About the Author

Venerable Henepola Gunaratana was ordained at the age of 12 as a
Buddhist monk at a small temple in Malandeniya Village in
Kurunegala District in Sri Lanka. His preceptor was Venerable
Kiribatkumbure Sonuttara Mahathera. At the age of 20 he was
given higher ordination in Kandy in 1947. He received his
education from Vidyalankara College and Buddhist Missionary
College in Colombo. Subsequently he traveled to India for five
years of missionary work for the Mahabodhi Society, serving the
Harijana (Untouchable) people in Sanchi, Delhi, and Bombay.
Later he spent ten years as a missionary in Malaysia, serving as
religious advisor to the Sasana Abhivurdhiwardhana Society,
Buddhist Missionary Society and the Buddhist Youth Federation of
Malaysia. He has been a teacher in Kishon Dial School and Temple
Road Girls' School and Principal of the Buddhist Institute of
Kuala Lumppur.

At the invitation of the Sasana Sevaka Society, Venerable
Gunaratana came to the United States in 1968 to serve as Hon.
General Secretary of the Buddhist Vihara Society of Washington,
D.C. In 1980 he was appointed President of the Society. During
his years at the Vihara, he has taught courses in Buddhism,
conducted meditation retreats, and lectured widely throughout the
United States, Canada, Europe, Australia and New Zealand.

He has also pursued his scholarly interests by earning a B.A.,
and M.A., and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the American University.
He taught courses in Buddhism at the American University,
Georgetown University and University of Maryland. His books and
articles have been published in Malaysia, India, Sri Lanka and
the United States.

Since 1973 he has been buddhist chaplin at The American
University counseling students interested in Buddhism and
Buddhist meditation. He is now president of the Bhavana Society
in West Virginia in the Shenandoah Valley, about 100 miles from
Washington, D.C. teaching meditation and conducting meditation
retreats.

Preface

In my experience I found that the most effective way to express
something in order to make others understand is to use the
simplest language. Also I learned from teaching that the more
rigid the language the less effective it is. People to not
respond to very stern and rigid language especially when we try
to teach something which normally people don't engage in during
their daily life. Meditation appears to them as something that
they cannot always do. As more people turn to meditation, they
need more simplified instructions so they can practice by
themselves without a teacher around. This book is the result of
requests made by many meditators who need a very simple book
written in ordinary colloquial language.

In preparing this book I have been helped by many of my friends.
I am deeply grateful to all of them. Especially I would like to
express my deepest appreciation and sincere gratitude to John
Patticord, Daniel J. Olmsted, Matthew Flickstein, Carol
Flickstein, Patrick Hamilton, Genny Hamilton, Bill Mayne, Bhikkhu
Dang Pham Jotika and Bhikkhu Sona for their most valuable
suggestions, comments and criticisms of numerous points in
preparing this book. Also thanks to Reverend Sister Sama and
Chris O'Keefe for their support in production efforts.

Introduction

American Buddhism

The subject of this book is Vipassana meditation practice.
Repeat, practice. This is a meditation manual, a nuts-and-bolts,
step-by-step guide to Insight meditation. It is meant to be
practical. It is meant for use.

There are already many comprehensive books on Buddhism as a
philosophy, and on the theoretical aspects of Buddhist
meditation. If you are interested in that material we urge you
to read those books. Many of them are excellent. This book is a
'How to.' It is written for those who actually want to meditate
and especially for those who want to start now. There are very
few qualified teachers of the Buddhist style of meditation in the
United States of America. It is our intention to give you the
basic data you need to get off to a flying start. Only those who
follow the instructions given here can say whether we have
succeeded or failed. Only those who actually meditate regularly
and diligently can judge our effort. No book can possibly cover
every problem that a meditator may run into. You will need to
meet a qualified teacher eventually. In the mean time, however,
these are the basic ground rules; a full understanding of these
pages will take you a very long way.

There are many styles of meditation. Every major religious
tradition has some sort of procedure which they call meditation,
and the word is often very loosely used. Please understand that
this volume deals exclusively with the Vipassana style of
meditation as taught and practiced in South and Southeast Asian
Buddhism. It is often translated as Insight meditation, since
the purpose of this system is to give the meditator insight into
the nature of reality and accurate understanding of how
everything works.

Buddhism as a whole is quite different from the theological
religions with which Westerners are most familiar. It is a
direct entrance to a spiritual or divine realm without addressing
deities or other 'agents'. Its flavor is intensely clinical,
much more akin to what we would call psychology than to what we
would usually call religion. It is an ever-ongoing investigation
of reality, a microscopic examination of the very process of
perception. Its intention is to pick apart the screen of lies
and delusions through which we normally view the world, and thus
to reveal the face of ultimate reality. Vipassana meditation is
an ancient and elegant technique for doing just that.

Theravada Buddhism presents us with an effective system for
exploring the deeper levels of the mind, down to the very root of
consciousness itself. It also offers a considerable system of
reverence and rituals in which those techniques are contained.
This beautiful tradition is the natural result of its 2,500-year
development within the highly traditional cultures of South and
Southeast Asia.

In this volume, we will make every effort to separate the
ornamental and the fundamental and to present only the naked
plain truth itself. Those readers who are of a ritual bent may
investigate the Theravada practice in other books, and will find
there a vast wealth of customs and ceremony, a rich tradition
full of beauty and significance. Those of a more clinical bent
may use just the techniques themselves, applying them within
whichever philosophical and emotional context they wish. The
practice is the thing.

The distinction between Vipassana meditation and other styles of
meditation is crucial and needs to be fully understood. Buddhism
addresses two major types of meditation. They are different
mental skills, modes of functioning or qualities of
consciousness. In Pali, the original language of Theravada
literature, they are called 'Vipassana' and 'Samatha'.

'Vipassana' can be translated as 'insight', a clear awareness of
exactly what is happening as it happens. 'Samatha' can be
translated as 'concentration' or 'tranquility'. It is a state in
which the mind is brought to rest, focused only on one item and
not allowed to wander. When this is done, a deep calm pervades
body and mind, a state of tranquility which must be experienced
to be understood. Most systems of meditation emphasize the
Samatha component. The meditator focuses his mind upon some
items, such as prayer, a certain type of box, a chant, a candle
flame, a religious image or whatever, and excludes all other
thoughts and perceptions from his consciousness. The result is a
state of rapture which lasts until the meditator ends the session
of sitting. It is beautiful, delightful meaningful and alluring,
but only temporary. Vipassana meditation address the other
component, insight.

The Vipassana meditator uses his concentration as a tool by which
his awareness can chip away at the wall of illusion which cuts
him off from the living light of reality. It is a gradual
process of ever-increasing awareness and into the inner workings
of reality itself. It takes years, but one day the meditator
chisels through that wall and tumbles into the presence of light.
The transformation is complete. It's called liberation, and it's
permanent. Liberation is the goal of all buddhist systems of
practice. But the routes to attainment of the end are quite
diverse.

There are an enormous number of distinct sects within Buddhism.
But they divide into two broad streams of thought -- Mahayana and
Theravada. Mahayana Buddhism prevails throughout East Asia,
shaping the cultures of China, Korea, Japan, Nepal, Tibet and
Vietnam. The most widely known of the Mahayana systems is Zen,
practiced mainly in Japan, Korea, Vietnam and the United States.
The Theravada system of practice prevails in South and Southeast
Asia in the countries of Sri Lanka, Thailand, Burma, Laos and
Cambodia. This book deals with Theravada practice.

The traditional Theravada literature describes the techniques of
both Samatha (concentration and tranquility of mind) and
Vipassana (insight or clear awareness). There are forty
different subjects of meditation described in the Pali
literature. They are recommended as objects of concentration and
as subjects of investigation leading to insight. But this is a
basic manual, and we limit our discussion to the most fundamental
of those recommended objects--breathing. This book is an
introduction to the attainment of mindfulness through bare
attention to, and clear comprehension of, the whole process of
breathing. Using the breath as his primary focus of attention,
the meditator applies participatory observation to the intirety
of his own perceptual universe. He learns to watch changes
occurring in all physical experiences, in feelings and in
perceptions. He learns to study his own mental activities and
the fluctuations in the character of consciousness itself. All
of these changes are occurring perpetually and are present in
every moment of our experiences.

Meditation is a living activity, an inherently experiential
activity. It cannot be taught as a purely scholastic subject.
The living heart of the process must come from the teacher's own
personal experience. Nevertheless, there is a vast fund of
codified material on the subject which is the product of some of
the most intelligent and deeply illumined human beings ever to
walk the earth. This literature is worthy of attention. Most of
the points given in this book are drawn from the Tipitaka, which
is the three-section collected work in which the Buddah's
original teachings have been preserved. The Tipitaka is
comprised of the Vinaya, the code of discipline for monks, nuns,
and lay people; the Suttas, public discourses attributed to the
Buddha; and the Abhidhamma, a set of deep psycho-philosophical
teachings.

In the first century after Christ, an eminent Buddhist scholar
named Upatissa wrote the Vimuttimagga, (The Path of Freedom) in
which he summarized the Buddha's teachings on meditation. In the
fifth century A.C. (after Christ,) another great Buddhist scholar
named Buddhaghosa covered the same ground in a second scholastic
thesis--the Visuddhimagga, (The Path of Purification) which is
the standard text on meditation even today. Modern meditation
teachers rely on the Tipitaka and upon their own personal
experiences. It is our intention to present you with the
clearest and most concise directions for Vipassana meditation
available in the English language. But this book offers you a
foot in the door. It's up to you to take the first few steps on
the road to the discovery of who you are and what it all means.
It is a journey worth taking. We wish you success.

Chapter 1

Meditation: Why Bother?

Meditation is not easy. It takes time and it takes energy. It
also takes grit, determination and discipline. It requires a
host of personal qualities which we normally regard as unpleasant
and which we like to avoid whenever possible. We can sum it all
up in the American word 'gumption'. Meditation takes 'gumption'.
It is certainly a great deal easier just to kick back and watch
television. So why bother? Why waste all that time and energy
when you could be out enjoying yourself? Why bother? Simple.
Because you are human. And just because of the simple fact that
you are human, you find yourself heir to an inherent
unsatisfactoriness in life which simply will not go away. You
can suppress it from your awareness for a time. You can distract
yourself for hours on end, but it always comes back--usually when
you least expect it. All of a sudden, seemingly out of the blue,
you sit up, take stock, and realize your actual situation in
life.

There you are, and you suddenly realize that you are spending
your whole life just barely getting by. You keep up a good
front. You manage to make ends meed somehow and look OK from the
outside. But those periods of desperation, those times when you
feel everything caving in on you, you keep those to yourself.
You are a mess. And you know it. But you hide it beautifully.
Meanwhile, way down under all that you just know there has got be
some other way to live, some better way to look at the world,
some way to touch life more fully. You click into it by chance
now and then. You get a good job. You fall in love. You win
the game. and for a while, things are different. Life takes on a
richness and clarity that makes all the bad times and humdrum
fade away. The whole texture of your experience changes and you
say to yourself, "OK, now I've made it; now I will be happy".
But then that fades, too, like smoke in the wind. You are left
with just a memory. That and a vague awareness that something is
wrong.

But there is really another whole realm of depth and sensitivity
available in life, somehow, you are just not seeing it. You wind
up feeling cut off. You feel insulated from the sweetness of
experience by some sort of sensory cotton. You are not really
touching life. You are not making it again. And then even that
vague awareness fades away, and you are back to the same old
reality. The world looks like the usual foul place, which is
boring at best. It is an emotional roller coaster, and you spend
a lot of your time down at the bottom of the ramp, yearning for
the heights.

So what is wrong with you? Are you a freak? No. You are just
human. And you suffer from the same malady that infects every
human being. It is a monster in side all of us, and it has many
arms: Chronic tension, lack of genuine compassion for others,
including the people closest to you, feelings being blocked up,
and emotional deadness. Many, many arms. None of us is entirely
free from it. We may deny it. We try to suppress it. We build
a whole culture around hiding from it, pretending it is not
there, and distracting ourselves from it with goals and projects
and status. But it never goes away. It is a constant
undercurrent in every thought and every perception; a little
wordless voice at the back of the head saying, "Not good enough
yet. Got to have more. Got to make it better. Got to be
better." It is a monster, a monster that manifests everywhere in
subtle forms.

Go to a party. Listen to the laughter, that brittle-tongued
voice that says fun on the surface and fear underneath. Feel the
tension, feel the pressure. Nobody really relaxes. They are
faking it. Go to a ball game. Watch the fan in the stand.
Watch the irrational fit of anger. Watch the uncontrolled
frustration bubbling forth from people that masquerades under the
guise of enthusiasm, or team spirit. Booing, cat-calls and
unbridled egotism in the name of team loyalty. Drunkenness,
fights in the stands. These are the people trying desperately to
release tension from within. These are not people who are at
peace with themselves. Watch the news on TV. Listen to the
lyrics in popular songs. You find the same theme repeated over
and over in variations. Jealousy, suffering, discontent and
stress.

Life seems to be a perpetual struggle, some enormous effort
against staggering odds. And what is our solution to all this
dissatisfaction? We get stuck in the ' If only' syndrome. If
only I had more money, then I would be happy. If only I can find
somebody who really loves me, if only I can lose 20 pounds, if
only I had a color TV, Jacuzzi, and curly hair, and on and on
forever. So where does all this junk come from and more
important, what can we do about it? It comes from the conditions
of our own minds. It is deep, subtle and pervasive set of mental
habits, a Gordian knot which we have built up bit by bit and we
can unravel just the same way, one piece at a time. We can tune
up our awareness, dredge up each separate piece and bring it out
into the light. We can make the unconscious conscious, slowly,
one piece at a time.

The essence of our experience is change. Change is incessant.
Moment by moment life flows by and it is never the same.
Perpetual alteration is the essence of the perceptual universe.
A thought springs up in you head and half a second later, it is
gone. In comes another one, and that is gone too. A sound
strikes your ears and then silence. Open your eyes and the world
pours in, blink and it is gone. People come into your life and
they leave again. Friends go, relatives die. Your fortunes go
up and they go down. Sometimes you win and just as often you
lose. It is incessant: change, change, change. No two moments
ever the same.

There is not a thing wrong with this. It is the nature of the
universe. But human culture has taught u some odd responses to
this endless flowing. We categorize experiences. We try to
stick each perception, every mental change in this endless flow
into one of three mental pigeon holes. It is good, or it is bad,
or it is neutral. Then, according to which box we stick it in,
we perceive with a set of fixed habitual mental responses. If a
particular perception has been labeled 'good', then we try to
freeze time right there. We grab onto that particular thought,
we fondle it, we hold it, we try to keep it from escaping. When
that does not work, we go all-out in an effort to repeat the
experience which caused that thought. Let us call this mental
habit 'grasping'.

Over on the other side of the mind lies the box labeled 'bad'.
When we perceive something 'bad', we try to push it away. We try
to deny it, reject it, get rid of it any way we can. We fight
against our own experience. We run from pieces of ourselves.
Let us call this mental habit 'rejecting'. Between these two
reactions lies the neutral box. Here we place the experiences
which are neither good nor bad. They are tepid, neutral,
uninteresting and boring. We pack experience away in the neutral
box so that we can ignore it and thus return jour attention to
where the action is, namely our endless round of desire and
aversion. This category of experience gets robbed of its fair
share of our attention. Let us call this mental habit
'ignoring'. The direct result of all this lunacy is a perpetual
treadmill race to nowhere, endlessly pounding after pleasure,
endlessly fleeing from pain, endlessly ignoring 90 percent of our
experience. Than wondering why life tastes so flat. In the
final analysis, it's a system that does not work.

No matter how hard you pursue pleasure and success, there are
times when you fail. No matter how fast you flee, there are
times when pain catches up with you. And in between those times,
life is so boring you could scream. Our minds are full of
opinions and criticisms. We have built walls all around
ourselves and we are trapped with the prison of our own lies and
dislikes. We suffer.

Suffering is big word in Buddhist thought. It is a key term and
it should be thoroughly understood. The Pali word is 'dukkha',
and it does not just mean the agony of the body. It means the
deep, subtle sense of unsatisfactoriness which is a part of every
mental treadmill. The essence of life is suffering, said the
Buddha. At first glance this seems exceedingly morbid and
pessimistic. It even seems untrue. After all, there are plenty
of times when we are happy. Aren't there? No, there are not. It
just seems that way. Take any moment when you feel really
fulfilled and examine it closely. Down under the joy, you will
find that subtle, all-pervasive undercurrent of tension, that no
matter how great the moment is, it is going to end. No matter
how much you just gained, you are either going to lose some of it
or spend the rest of your days guarding what you have got and
scheming how to get more. And in the end, you are going to die.
In the end, you lose everything. It is all transitory.

Sounds pretty bleak, doesn't it? Luckily it's not; not at all.
It only sounds bleak when you view it from the level of ordinary
mental perspective, the very level at which the treadmill
mechanism operates. Down under that level lies another whole
perspective, a completely different way to look at the universe.
It is a level of functioning where the mind does not try to
freeze time, where we do not grasp onto our experience as it
flows by, where we do not try to block things out and ignore
them. It is a level of experience beyond good and bad, beyond
pleasure and pain. It is a lovely way to perceive the world, and
it is a learnable skill. It is not easy, but is learnable.

Happiness and peace. Those are really the prime issues in human
existence. That is what all of us are seeking. This often is a
bit hard to see because we cover up those basic goals with layers
of surface objectives. We want food, we want money, we want sex,
possessions and respect. We even say to ourselves that the idea
of 'happiness' is too abstract: "Look, I am practical. Just give
me enough money and I will buy all the happiness I need".
Unfortunately, this is an attitude that does not work. Examine
each of these goals and you will find they are superficial. You
want food. Why? Because I am hungry. So you are hungry, so
what? Well if I eat, I won't be hungry and then I'll feel good.
Ah ha! Feel good! Now there is a real item. What we really
seek is not the surface goals. They are just means to an end.
What we are really after is the feeling of relief that comes when
the drive is satisfied. Relief, relaxation and an end to the
tension. Peace, happiness, no more yearning.

So what is this happiness? For most of us, the perfect happiness
would mean getting everything we wanted, being in control of
everything, playing Caesar, making the whole world dance a jig
according to our every whim. Once again, it does not work that
way. Take a look at the people in history who have actually held
this ultimate power. These were not happy people. Most
assuredly they were not men at peace with themselves. Why?
Because they were driven to control the world totally and
absolutely and they could not. They wanted to control all men
and there remained men who refused to be controlled. They could
not control the stars. They still got sick. They still had to
die.

You can't ever get everything you want. It is impossible.
Luckily, there is another option. You can learn to control your
mind, to step outside of this endless cycle of desire and
aversion. You can learn to not want what you want, to recognize
desires but not be controlled by them. This does not mean that
you lie down on the road and invite everybody to walk all over
you . It means that you continue to live a very normal-looking
life, but live from a whole new viewpoint. You do the things
that a person must do, but you are free from that obsessive,
compulsive drivenness of your own desires. You want something,
but you don't need to chase after it. You fear something, but
you don't need to stand there quaking in your boots. This sort
of mental culture is very difficult. It takes years. But trying
to control everything is impossible, and the difficult is
preferable to the impossible.

Wait a minute, though. Peace and happiness! Isn't that what
civilization is all about? We build skyscrapers and freeways.
We have paid vacations, TV sets. We provide free hospitals and
sick leaves, Social Security and welfare benefits. All of that
is aimed at providing some measure of peace and happiness. Yet
the rate of mental illness climbs steadily, and the crime rates
rise faster. The streets are crawling with delinquents and
unstable individuals. Stick you arms outside the safety of your
own door and somebody is very likely to steal your watch!
Something is not working. A happy man does not feel driven to
kill. We like to think that our society is exploiting every area
of human knowledge in order to achieve peace and happiness.

We are just beginning to realize that we have overdeveloped the
material aspect of existence at the expense of the deeper
emotional and spiritual aspect, and we are paying the price for
that error. It is one thing to talk about degeneration of moral
and spiritual fiber in America today, and another thing to do
something about it. The place to start is within ourselves.
Look carefully inside, truly and objectively, and each of us will
see moments when "I am the punk" and "I am the crazy". We will
learn to see those moments, see them clearly, cleanly and without
condemnation, and we will be on our way up and out of being so.

You can't make radical changes in the pattern of your life until
you begin to see yourself exactly as you are now. As soon as you
do that, changes flow naturally. You don't have to force or
struggle or obey rules dictated to you by some authority. You
just change. It is automatic. But arriving at the initial
insight is quite a task. You've got to see who you are and how
you are, without illusion, judgement or resistance of any kind.
You've got to see your own place in society and your function as
a social being. You've got to see your duties and obligations to
your fellow human beings, and above all, your responsibility to
yourself as an individual living with other individuals. And
you've got to see all of that clearly and as a unit, a single
gestalt of interrelationship. It sounds complex, but it often
occurs in a single instant. Mental culture through meditation is
without rival in helping you achieve this sort of understanding
and serene happiness.

The Dhammapada is an ancient Buddhist text which anticipated
Freud by thousands of years. It says: "What you are now is the
result of what you were. What you will be tomorrow will be the
result of what you are now. The consequences of an evil mind
will follow you like the cart follows the ox that pulls it. The
consequences of a purified mind will follow you like you own
shadow. No one can do more for you than your own purified mind--
no parent, no relative, no friend, no one. A well-disciplined
mind brings happiness".

Meditation is intended to purify the mind. It cleanses the
thought process of what can be called psychic irritants, things
like greed, hatred and jealousy, things that keep you snarled up
in emotional bondage. It brings the mind to a state of
tranquility and awareness, a state of concentration and insight.

In our society, we are great believers in education. We believe
that knowledge makes a cultured person civilized. Civilization,
however, polishes the person superficially. Subject our noble
and sophisticated gentleman to stresses of war or economic
collapse, and see what happens. It is one thing to obey the law
because you know the penalties and fear the consequences. It is
something else entirely to obey the law because you have cleansed
yourself from the greed that would make you steal and the hatred
that would make you kill. Throw a stone into a stream. The
running water would smooth the surface, but the inner part
remains unchanged. Take that same stone and place it in the
intense fires of a forge, and the whole stone changes inside and
outside. It all melts. Civilization changes man on the outside.
Meditation softens him within, through and through.

Meditation is called the Great Teacher. It is the cleansing
crucible fire that works slowly through understanding. The
greater your understanding, the more flexible and tolerant you
can be. The greater your understanding, the more compassionate
you can be. You become like a perfect parent or an ideal
teacher. You are ready to forgive and forget. You feel love
towards others because you understand them. And you understand
others because you have understood yourself. You have looked
deeply inside and seen self illusion and your own human failings.
You have seen your own humanity and learned to forgive and to
love. When you have learned compassion for yourself, compassion
for others is automatic. An accomplished meditator has achieved
a profound understanding of life, and he inevitably relates to
the world with a deep and uncritical love.

Meditation is a lot like cultivating a new land. To make a field
out of a forest, fist you have to clear the trees and pull out
the stumps. Then you till the soil and you fertilize it. Then
you sow your seed and you harvest your crops. To cultivate your
mind, first you have to clear out the various irritants that are
in the way, pull them right out by the root so that they won't
grow back. Then you fertilize. You pump energy and discipline
in the mental soil. Then you sow the seed and you harvest your
crops of faith, morality , mindfulness and wisdom.

Faith and morality, by the way, have a special meaning in this
context. Buddhism does not advocate faith in the sense of
believing something because it is written in a book or attributed
to a prophet or taught to you by some authority figure. The
meaning here is closer to confidence. It is knowing that
something is true because you have seen it work, because you have
observed that very thing within yourself. In the same way,
morality is not a ritualistic obedience to some exterior, imposed
code of behavior.

The purpose of meditation is personal transformation. The you
that goes in one side of the meditation experience is not the
same you that comes out the other side. It changes your
character by a process of sensitization, by making you deeply
aware of your own thoughts, word, and deeds. Your arrogance
evaporated and your antagonism dries up. Your mind becomes still
and calm. And your life smoothes out. Thus meditation properly
performed prepares you to meet the ups and down of existence. It
reduces your tension, your fear, and your worry. Restlessness
recedes and passion moderates. Things begin to fall into place
and your life becomes a glide instead of a struggle. All of this
happens through understanding.

Meditation sharpens your concentration and your thinking power.
Then, piece by piece, your own subconscious motives and mechanics
become clear to you. Your intuition sharpens. The precision of
your thought increases and gradually you come to a direct
knowledge of things as they really are, without prejudice and
without illusion. So is this reason enough to bother? Scarcely.
These are just promises on paper. There is only one way you will
ever know if meditation is worth the effort. Learn to do it
right, and do it. See for yourself.

Chapter 2

What Meditation Isn't

Meditation is a word. You have heard this word before, or you
would never have picked up this book. The thinking process
operates by association, and all sorts of ideas are associated
with the word 'meditation'. Some of them are probably accurate
and others are hogwash. Some of them pertain more properly to
other systems of meditation and have nothing to do with Vipassana
practice. Before we proceed, it behooves us to blast some of the
residue out of our own neuronal circuits so that new information
can pass unimpeded. Let us start with some of the most obvious
stuff.

We are not going to teach you to contemplate your navel or to
chant secret syllables. You are not conquering demons or
harnessing invisible energies. There are no colored belts given
for your performance and you don't have to shave your head or
wear a turban. You don't even have to give away all your
belongings and move to a monastery. In fact, unless your life is
immoral and chaotic, you can probably get started right away and
make some sort of progress. Sounds fairly encouraging, wouldn't
you say?

There are many, many books on the subject of meditation. Most of
them are written from the point of view which lies squarely
within one particular religious or philosophical tradition, and
many of the authors have not bothered to point this out. They
make statements about meditation which sound like general laws,
but are actually highly specific procedures exclusive to that
particular system of practice. The result is something of a
muddle. Worse yet is the panoply of complex theories and
interpretations available, all of them at odds with one another.
The result is a real mess and an enormous jumble of conflicting
opinions accompanied by a mass of extraneous data. This book is
specific. We are dealing exclusively with the Vipassana system
of meditation. We are going to teach you to watch the
functioning of your own mind in a calm and detached manner so you
can gain insight into your own behavior. The goal is awareness,
an awareness so intense, concentrated and finely tuned that you
will be able to pierce the inner workings of reality itself.

There are a number of common misconceptions about meditation. We
see them crop up again and again from new students, the same
questions over and over. It is best to deal with these things at
once, because they are the sort of preconceptions which can block
your progress right from the outset. We are going to take these
misconceptions one at a time and explode them.

Misconception #1
Meditation is just a relaxation technique

The bugaboo here is the word 'just'. Relaxation is a key
component of meditation, but Vipassana-style meditation aims at a
much loftier goal. Nevertheless, the statement is essentially
true for many other systems of meditation. All meditation
procedures stress concentration of the mind, bringing the mind to
rest on one item or one area of thought. Do it strongly and
thoroughly enough, and you achieve a deep and blissful relaxation
which is called Jhana. It is a state of such supreme tranquility
that it amounts to rapture. It is a form of pleasure which lies
above and beyond anything that can be experienced in the normal
state of consciousness. Most systems stop right there. That is
the goal, and when you attain that, you simply repeat the
experience for the rest of your life. Not so with Vipassana
meditation. Vipassana seeks another goal--awareness.
Concentration and relaxation are considered necessary
concomitants to awareness. They are required precursors, handy
tools, and beneficial byproducts. But they are not the goal.
The goal is insight. Vipassana meditation is a profound
religious practice aimed at nothing less that the purification
and transformation of your everyday life. We will deal more
thoroughly with the differences between concentration and insight
in Chapter 14.

Misconception #2
Meditation means going into a trance

Here again the statement could be applied accurately to certain
systems of meditation, but not to Vipassana. Insight meditation
is not a form of hypnosis. You are not trying to black out your
mind so as to become unconscious. You are not trying to turn
yourself into an emotionless vegetable. If anything, the reverse
is true. You will become more and more attuned to your own
emotional changes. You will learn to know yourself with ever-
greater clarity and precision. In learning this technique,
certain states do occur which may appear trance-like to the
observer. But they are really quite the opposite. In hypnotic
trance, the subject is susceptible to control by another party,
whereas in deep concentration the meditator remains very much
under his own control. The similarity is superficial, and in any
case the occurrence of these phenomena is not the point of
Vipassana. As we have said, the deep concentration of Jhana is a
tool or stepping stone on the route of heightened awareness.
Vipassana by definition is the cultivation of mindfulness or
awareness. If you find that you are becoming unconscious in
meditation, then you aren't meditating, according to the
definition of the word as used in the Vipassana system. It is
that simple.

Misconception #3
Meditation is a mysterious practice which cannot be understood

Here again, this is almost true, but not quite. Meditation deals
with levels of consciousness which lie deeper than symbolic
thought. Therefore, some of the data about meditation just won't
fit into words. That does not mean, however, that it cannot be
understood. There are deeper ways to understand things than
words. You understand how to walk. You probably can't describe
the exact order in which your nerve fibers and your muscles
contract during that process. But you can do it. Meditation
needs to be understood that same way, by doing it. It is not
something that you can learn in abstract terms. It is to be
experienced. Meditation is not some mindless formula which gives
automatic and predictable results. You can never really predict
exactly what will come up in any particular session. It is an
investigation and experiment and an adventure every time. In
fact, this is so true that when you do reach a feeling of
predictability and sameness in your practice, you use that as an
indicator. It means that you have gotten off the track somewhere
and you are headed for stagnation. Learning to look at each
second as if it were the first and only second in the universe is
most essential in Vipassana meditation.

Misconception #4
The purpose of meditation is to become a psychic superman

No, the purpose of meditation is to develop awareness. Learning
to read minds is not the point. Levitation is not the goal. The
goal is liberation. There is a link between psychic phenomena
and meditation, but the relationship is somewhat complex. During
early stages of the meditator's career, such phenomena may or may
not arise. Some people may experience some intuitive
understanding or memories from past lives; others do not. In any
case, these are not regarded as well-developed and reliable
psychic abilities. Nor should they be given undue importance.
Such phenomena are in fact fairly dangerous to new meditators in
that they are too seductive. They can be an ego trap which can
lure you right off the track. Your best advice is not to place
any emphasis on these phenomena. If they come up, that's fine.
If they don't, that's fine, too. It's unlikely that they will.
There is a point in the meditator's career where he may practice
special exercises to develop psychic powers. But this occurs way
down the line. After he has gained a very deep stage of Jhana,
the meditator will be far enough advanced to work with such
powers without the danger of their running out of control or
taking over his life. He will then develop them strictly for the
purpose of service to others. This state of affairs only occurs
after decades of practice. Don't worry about it. Just
concentrate on developing more and more awareness. If voices and
visions pop up, just notice them and let them go. Don't get
involved.

Misconception #5
Meditation is dangerous and a prudent person should avoid it

Everything is dangerous. Walk across the street and you may get
hit by a bus. Take a shower and you could break your neck.
Meditate and you will probably dredge up various nasty-matters
from your past. The suppressed material that has been buried
there for quite some time can be scary. It is also highly
profitable. No activity is entirely without risk, but that does
not mean that we should wrap ourselves in some protective cocoon.
That is not living. That is premature death. The way to deal
with danger is to know approximately how much of it there is,
where it is likely to be found and how to deal with it when it
arises. That is the purpose of this manual. Vipassana is
development of awareness. That in itself is not dangerous, but
just the opposite. Increased awareness is the safeguard against
danger. Properly done, meditation is a very gently and gradual
process. Take it slow and easy, and development of your practice
will occur very naturally. Nothing should be forced. Later,
when you are under the close scrutiny and protective wisdom of a
competent teacher, you can accelerate your rate of growth by
taking a period of intensive meditation. In the beginning,
though, easy does it. Work gently and everything will be fine.

Misconception #6
Meditation is for saints and holy men, not for regular people

You find this attitude very prevalent in Asia, where monks and
holy men are accorded an enormous amount of ritualized reverence.
This is somewhat akin to the American attitude of idealizing
movie stars and baseball heroes. Such people are stereotyped,
made larger than life, and saddled with all sort of
characteristics that few human beings can ever live up to. Even
in the West, we share some of this attitude about meditation. We
expect the meditator to be some extraordinarily pious figure in
whose mouth butter would never dare to melt. A little personal
contact with such people will quickly dispel this illusion. They
usually prove to be people of enormous energy and gusto, people
who live their lives with amazing vigor. It is true, of course,
that most holy men meditate, but they don't meditate because they
are holy men. That is backward. They are holy men because they
meditate. Meditation is how they got there. And they started
meditating before they became holy. This is an important point.
A sizable number of students seems to feel that a person should
be completely moral before he begins meditation. It is an
unworkable strategy. Morality requires a certain degree of
mental control. It's a prerequisite. You can't follow any set
of moral precepts without at least a little self-control, and if
your mind is perpetually spinning like a fruit cylinder in a one-
armed bandit, self-control is highly unlikely. So mental culture
has to come first.

There are three integral factors in Buddhist meditation ---
morality, concentration and wisdom. Those three factors grow
together as your practice deepens. Each one influences the
other, so you cultivate the three of them together, not one at a
time. When you have the wisdom to truly understand a situation,
compassion towards all the parties involved is automatic, and
compassion means that you automatically restrain yourself from
any thought, word or deed that might harm yourself or others.
Thus your behavior is automatically moral. It is only when you
don't understand things deeply that you create problems. If you
fail to see the consequences of your own action, you will
blunder. The fellow who waits to become totally moral before he
begins to meditate is waiting for a 'but' that will never come.
The ancient sages say that he is like a man waiting for the ocean
to become calm so that he can go take a bath. To understand this
relationship more fully, let us propose that there are levels of
morality. The lowest level is adherence to a set of rules and
regulations laid down by somebody else. It could be your
favorite prophet. It could be the state, the head man of your
tribe or your father. No matter who generates the rules, all
you've got to do at this level is know the rules and follow them.
A robot can do that. Even a trained chimpanzee could do it if
the rules were simple enough and he was smacked with a stick
every time he broke one. This level requires no meditation at
all. All you need are the rules and somebody to swing the stick.

The next level of morality consists of obeying the same rules
even in the absence of somebody who will smack you. You obey
because you have internalized the rules. You smack yourself
every time you break one. This level requires a bit of mind
control. If your thought pattern is chaotic, your behavior will
be chaotic, too. Mental culture reduces mental chaos.

There is a third level or morality, but it might be better termed
ethics. This level is a whole quantum layer up the scale, a real
paradigm shift in orientation. At the level of ethics, one does
not follow hard and fast rules dictated by authority. One
chooses his own behavior according to the needs of the situation.
This level requires real intelligence and an ability to juggle
all the factors in every situation and arrive at a unique,
creative and appropriate response each time. Furthermore, the
individual making these decisions needs to have dug himself out
of his own limited personal viewpoint. He has to see the entire
situation from an objective point of view, giving equal weight to
his own needs and those of others. In other words, he has to be
free from greed, hatred, envy and all the other selfish junk that
ordinarily keeps us from seeing the other guy's side of the
issue. Only then can he choose that precise set of actions which
will be truly optimal for that situation. This level of morality
absolutely demands meditation, unless you were born a saint.
There is no other way to acquire the skill. Furthermore, the
sorting process required at this level is exhausting. If you
tried to juggle all those factors in every situation with your
conscious mind, you'd wear yourself out. The intellect just
can't keep that many balls in the air at once. It is an
overload. Luckily, a deeper level of consciousness can do this
sort of processing with ease. Meditation can accomplish the
sorting process for you. It is an eerie feeling.

One day you've got a problem--say to handle Uncle Herman's latest
divorce. It looks absolutely unsolvable, and enormous muddle of
'maybes' that would give Solomon himself the willies. The next
day you are washing the dishes, thinking about something else
entirely, and suddenly the solution is there. It just pops out
of the deep mind and you say, 'Ah ha!' and the whole thing is
solved. This sort of intuition can only occur when you disengage
the logic circuits from the problem and give the deep mind the
opportunity to cook up the solution. The conscious mind just
gets in the way. Meditation teaches you how to disentangle
yourself from the thought process. It is the mental art of
stepping out of your own way, and that's a pretty useful skill in
everyday life. Meditation is certainly not some irrelevant
practice strictly for ascetics and hermits. It is a practical
skill that focuses on everyday events and has immediate
application in everybody's life. Meditation is not other-
worldly.

Unfortunately, this very fact constitutes the drawback for
certain students. They enter the practice expecting
instantaneous cosmic revelation, complete with angelic choirs.
What they usually get is a more efficient way to take out the
trash and better ways to deal with Uncle Herman. They are
needlessly disappointed. The trash solution comes first. The
voices of archangels take a bit longer.

Misconception #7
Meditation is running away from reality

Incorrect. Meditation is running into reality. It does not
insulate you from the pain of life. It allows you to delve so
deeply into life and all its aspects that you pierce the pain
barrier and you go beyond suffering. Vipassana is a practice
done with the specific intention of facing reality, to fully
experience life just as it is and to cope with exactly what you
find. It allows you to blow aside the illusions and to free
yourself from all those polite little lies you tell yourself all
the time. What is there is there. You are who you are, and
lying to yourself about your own weaknesses and motivations only
binds you tighter to the wheel of illusion. Vipassana meditation
is not an attempt to forget yourself or to cover up your
troubles. It is learning to look at yourself exactly as you are.
See what is there, accept it fully. Only then can you change it.

Misconception #8
Meditation is a great way to get high

Well, yes and no. Meditation does produce lovely blissful
feelings sometimes. But they are not the purpose, and they don't
always occur. Furthermore, if you do meditation with that
purpose in mind, they are less likely to occur than if you just
meditate for the actual purpose of meditation, which is increased
awareness. Bliss results from relaxation, and relaxation results
from release of tension. Seeking bliss from meditation
introduces tension into the process, which blows the whole chain
of events. It is a Catch-22. You can only have bliss if you
don't chase it. Besides, if euphoria and good feelings are what
you are after, there are easier ways to get them. They are
available in taverns and from shady characters on the street
corners all across the nation. Euphoria is not the purpose of
meditation. It will often arise, but it to be regarded as a by-
product. Still, it is a very pleasant side-effect, and it
becomes more and more frequent the longer you meditate. You
won't hear any disagreement about this from advanced
practitioners.

Misconception #9
Meditation is selfish

It certainly looks that way. There sits the meditator parked on
his little cushion. Is he out giving blood? No. Is he busy
working with disaster victims? No. But let us examine his
motivation. Why is he doing this? His intention is to purge his
own mind of anger, prejudice and ill-will. He is actively
engaged in the process of getting rid of greed, tension and
insensitivity. Those are the very items which obstruct his
compassion for others. Until they are gone, any good works that
he does are likely to be just an extension of his own ego and of
no real help in the long run. Harm in the name of help is one of
the oldest games. The grand inquisitor of the Spanish
Inquisition spouts the loftiest of motives. The Salem witchcraft
trials were conducted for the public good. Examine the personal
lives of advanced meditators and you will often find them engaged
in humanitarian service. You will seldom find them as crusading
missionaries who are willing to sacrifice certain individuals for
the sake of some pious idea. The fact is we are more selfish
than we know. The ego has a way of turning the loftiest
activities into trash if it is allowed free range. Through
meditation we become aware of ourselves exactly as we are, by
waking up to the numerous subtle ways that we manifest our own
selfishness. Then we truly begin to be genuinely selfless.
Cleansing yourself of selfishness is not a selfish activity.

Misconception #10
When you meditate, you sit around thinking lofty thoughts

Wrong again. There are certain systems of contemplation in which
this sort of thing is done. But that is not Vipassana.
Vipassana is the practice of awareness. Awareness of whatever is
there, be it supreme truth or crummy trash. What is there is
there. Of course, lofty aesthetic thoughts may arise during your
practice. They are certainly not to be avoided. Neither are
they to be sought. They are just pleasant side-effects.
Vipassana is a simple practice. It consists of experiencing your
own life events directly, without preference and without mental
images pasted to them. Vipassana is seeing your life unfold from
moment to moment without biases. What comes up comes up. It is
very simple.

Misconception #11
A couple of weeks of meditation and all my problems will go away

Sorry, meditation is not a quick cure-all. You will start seeing
changes right away, but really profound effects are years down
the line. That is just the way the universe is constructed.
Nothing worthwhile is achieved overnight. Meditation is tough in
some respects. It requires a long discipline and sometimes a
painful process of practice. At each sitting you gain some
results, but those results are often very subtle. They occur
deep within the mind, only to manifest much later. and if you
are sitting there constantly looking for some huge instantaneous
changes, you will miss the subtle shifts altogether. You will
get discouraged, give up and swear that no such changes will ever
occur. Patience is the key. Patience. If you learn nothing
else from meditation, you will learn patience. And that is the
most valuable lesson available.

Chapter 3

What Meditation Is

Meditation is a word, and words are used in different ways by
different speakers. This may seem like a trivial point, but it
is not. It is quite important to distinguish exactly what a
particular speaker means by the words he uses. Every culture on
earth, for example, has produced some sort of mental practice
which might be termed meditation. It all depends on how loose a
definition you give to that word. Everybody does it, from
Africans to Eskimos. The techniques are enormously varied, and
we will make no attempt to survey them. There are other books
for that. For the purpose of this volume, we will restrict our
discussion to those practices best known to Western audiences and
most likely associated with the term meditation.

Within the Judeo-Christian tradition we find two overlapping
practices called prayer and contemplation. Prayer is a direct
address to some spiritual entity. Contemplation in a prolonged
period of conscious thought about some specific topic, usually a
religious ideal or scriptural passage. From the standpoint of
mental culture, both of these activities are exercises in
concentration. The normal deluge of conscious thought is
restricted, and the mind is brought to one conscious area of
operation. The results are those you find in any concentrative
practice: deep calm, a physiological slowing of the metabolism
and a sense of peace and well-being.

Out of the Hindu tradition comes Yogic meditation, which is also
purely concentrative. The traditional basic exercises consist of
focusing the mind on a single object a stone, a candle flame, a
syllable or whatever, and not allowing it to wander. Having
acquired the basic skill, the Yogi proceeds to expand his
practice by taking on more complex objects of meditation chants,
colorful religious images, energy channels in the body and so
forth. Still, no matter how complex the object of meditation,
the meditation itself remains purely an exercise in
concentration.

Within the Buddhist tradition, concentration is also highly
valued. But a new element is added and more highly stressed.
That element is awareness. All Buddhist meditation aims at the
development of awareness, using concentration as a tool. The
Buddhist tradition is very wide, however, and there are several
diverse routes to this goal. Zen meditation uses two separate
tacks. The first is the direct plunge into awareness by sheer
force of will. You sit down and you just sit, meaning that you
toss out of your mind everything except pure awareness of
sitting. This sounds very simple. It is not. A brief trial
will demonstrate just how difficult it really is. The second Zen
approach used in the Rinzai school is that of tricking the mind
out of conscious thought and into pure awareness. This is done
by giving the student an unsolvable riddle which he must solve
anyway, and by placing him in a horrendous training situation.
Since he cannot flee from the pain of the situation, he must flee
into a pure experience of the moment. There is nowhere else to
go. Zen is tough. It is effective for many people, but it is
really tough.

Another stratagem, Tantric Buddhism, is nearly the reverse.
Conscious thought, at least the way we usually do it, is the
manifestation of ego, the you that you usually think that you are.
Conscious thought is tightly connected with self-concept. The
self-concept or ego is nothing more than a set of reactions and
mental images which are artificially pasted to the flowing
process of pure awareness. Tantra seeks to obtain pure awareness
by destroying this ego image. This is accomplished by a process
of visualization. The student is given a particular religious
image to meditate upon, for example, one of the deities from the
Tantric pantheon. He does this in so thorough a fashion that he
becomes that entity. He takes off his own identity and puts on
another. This takes a while, as you might imagine, but it works.
During the process, he is able to watch the way that the ego is
constructed and put in place. He comes to recognize the
arbitrary nature of all egos, including his own, and he escapes
from bondage to the ego. He is left in a state where he may have
an ego if he so chooses, either his own or whichever other he
might wish, or he can do without one. Result: pure awareness.
Tantra is not exactly a game of patty cake either.

Vipassana is the oldest of Buddhist meditation practices. The
method comes directly from the Sitipatthana Sutta, a discourse
attributed to Buddha himself. Vipassana is a direct and gradual
cultivation of mindfulness or awareness. It proceeds piece by
piece over a period of years. The student's attention is
carefully directed to an intense examination of certain aspects
of his own existence. The meditator is trained to notice more
and more of his own flowing life experience. Vipassana is a
gentle technique. But it also is very , very thorough. It is an
ancient and codified system of sensitivity training, a set of
exercises dedicated to becoming more and more receptive to your
own life experience. It is attentive listening, total seeing and
careful testing. We learn to smell acutely, to touch fully and
really pay attention to what we feel. We learn to listen to our
own thoughts without being caught up in them.

The object of Vipassana practice is to learn to pay attention.
We think we are doing this already, but that is an illusion. It
comes from the fact that we are paying so little attention to the
ongoing surge of our own life experiences that we might just as
well be asleep. We are simply not paying enough attention to
notice that we are not paying attention. It is another Catch-22.

Through the process of mindfulness, we slowly become aware of
what we really are down below the ego image. We wake up to what
life really is. It is not just a parade of ups and downs,
lollipops and smacks on the wrist. That is an illusion. Life
has a much deeper texture than that if we bother to look, and if
we look in the right way.

Vipassana is a form of mental training that will teach you to
experience the world in an entirely new way. You will learn for
the first time what is truly happening to you, around you and
within you. It is a process of self discovery, a participatory
investigation in which you observe your own experiences while
participating in them, and as they occur. The practice must be
approached with this attitude.

"Never mind what I have been taught. Forget about theories and
prejudgments and stereotypes. I want to understand the true
nature of life. I want to know what this experience of being
alive really is. I want to apprehend the true and deepest
qualities of life, and I don't want to just accept somebody
else's explanation. I want to see it for myself." If you pursue
your meditation practice with this attitude, you will succeed.
You'll find yourself observing things objectively, exactly as
they are--flowing and changing from moment to moment. Life then
takes on an unbelievable richness which cannot be described. It
has to be experienced.

The Pali term for Insight meditation is Vipassana Bhavana.
Bhavana comes from the root 'Bhu', which means to grow or to
become. There fore Bhavana means to cultivate, and the word is
always used in reference to the mind. Bhavana means mental
cultivation. 'Vipassana' is derived from two roots. 'Passana'
means seeing or perceiving. 'Vi' is a prefix with the complex
set of connotations. The basic meaning is 'in a special way.'
But there also is the connotation of both 'into' and 'through'.
The whole meaning of the word is looking into something with
clarity and precision, seeing each component as distinct and
separate, and piercing all the way through so as to perceive the
most fundamental reality of that thing. This process leads to
insight into the basic reality of whatever is being inspected.
Put it all together and 'Vipassana Bhavana' means the cultivation
of the mind, aimed at seeing in a special way that leads to
insight and to full understanding.

In Vipassana mediation we cultivate this special way of seeing
life. We train ourselves to see reality exactly as it is, and we
call this special mode of perception 'mindfulness.' This process
of mindfulness is really quite different from what we usually do.
We usually do not look into what is really there in front of us.
We see life through a screen of thoughts and concepts, and we
mistake those mental objects for the reality. We get so caught
up in this endless thought stream that reality flows by
unnoticed. We spend our time engrossed in activity, caught up in
an eternal pursuit of pleasure and gratification and an eternal
flight from pain and unpleasantness. We spend all of our
energies trying to make ourselves feel better, trying to bury our
fears. We are endlessly seeking security. Meanwhile, the world
of real experience flows by untouched and untasted. In Vipassana
meditation we train ourselves to ignore the constant impulses to
be more comfortable, and we dive into the reality instead. The
ironic thing is that real peace comes only when you stop chasing
it. Another Catch-22.

When you relax your driving desire for comfort, real fulfillment
arises. When you drop your hectic pursuit of gratification, the
real beauty of life comes out. When you seek to know the reality
without illusion, complete with all its pain and danger, that is
when real freedom and security are yours. This is not some
doctrine we are trying to drill into you. This is an observable
reality, a thing you can and should see for yourself.

Buddhism is 2500 years old, and any thought system of that
vintage has time to develop layers and layers of doctrine and
ritual. Nevertheless, the fundamental attitude of Buddhism is
intensely empirical and anti-authoritarian. Gotama the Buddha
was a highly unorthodox individual and real anti-traditionalist.
He did not offer his teaching as a set of dogmas, but rather as a
set of propositions for each individual to investigate for
himself. His invitation to one and all was 'Come and See'. One
of the things he said to his followers was "Place no head above
your own". By this he meant, don't accept somebody else's word.
See for yourself.

We want you to apply this attitude to every word you read in this
manual. We are not making statements that you would accept
merely because we are authorities in the field. Blind faith has
nothing to do with this. These are experiential realities.
Learn to adjust your mode of perception according to instructions
given in the book, and you will see for yourself. That and only
that provides ground for your faith. Insight meditation is
essentially a practice of investigative personal discovery.

Having said this, we will present here a very short synopsis of
some of the key points of Buddhist philosophy. We make not
attempt to be thorough, since that has been quite nicely done in
many other books. This material is essential to understanding
Vipassana, therefore, some mention must be made.

From the Buddhist point of view, we human beings live in a very
peculiar fashion. We view impermanent things as permanent,
though everything is changing all around us. The process of
change is constant and eternal. As you read these words, your
body is aging. But you pay no attention to that. The book in
you hand is decaying. The print is fading and the pages are
becoming brittle. The walls around you are aging. The molecules
within those walls are vibrating at an enormous rate, and
everything is shifting, going to pieces and dissolving slowly.
You pay no attention to that, either. Then one day you look
around you. Your body is wrinkled and squeaky and you hurt. The
book is a yellowed, useless lump; the building is caving in. So
you pine for lost youth and you cry when the possessions are
gone. Where does this pain come from? It comes from your own
inattention. You failed to look closely at life. You failed to
observe the constantly shifting flow of the world as it went by.
You set up a collection of mental constructions, 'me', 'the
book', 'the building', and you assume that they would endure
forever. They never do. But you can tune into the constantly
ongoing change. You can learn to perceive your life as an ever-
flowing movement, a thing of great beauty like a dance or
symphony. You can learn to take joy in the perpetual passing
away of all phenomena. You can learn to live with the flow of
existence rather than running perpetually against the grain. You
can learn this. It is just a matter of time and training.

Our human perceptual habits are remarkably stupid in some ways.
We tune out 99% of all the sensory stimuli we actually receive,
and we solidify the remainder into discrete mental objects. Then
we react to those mental objects in programmed habitual ways. An
example: There you are, sitting alone in the stillness of a
peaceful night. A dog barks in the distance. The perception
itself is indescribably beautiful if you bother to examine it.
Up out of that sea of silence come surging waves of sonic
vibration. You start to hear the lovely complex patterns, and
they are turned into scintillating electronic stimulations within
the nervous system. The process is beautiful and fulfilling in
itself. We humans tend to ignore it totally. Instead, we
solidify that perception into a mental object. We paste a mental
picture on it and we launch into a series of emotional and
conceptual reactions to it. "There is that dog again. He is
always barking at night. What a nuisance. Every night he is a
real bother. Somebody should do something. Maybe I should call
a cop. No, a dog catcher. So, I'll call the pound. No, maybe
I'll just write a real nasty letter to the guy who owns that dog.
No, too much trouble. I'll just get an ear plug." They are just
perceptual and mental habits. You learn to respond this way as a
child by copying the perceptual habits of those around you.
These perceptual responses are not inherent in the structure of
the nervous system. The circuits are there. But this is not the
only way that our mental machinery can be used. That which has
been learned can be unlearned. The first step is to realize what
you are doing, as you are doing it, and stand back and quietly
watch.

From the Buddhist perspective, we humans have a backward view of
life. We look at what is actually the cause of suffering and we
see it as happiness. The cause of suffering is that desire-
aversion syndrome which we spoke of earlier. Up pops a
perception. It could be anything--a beautiful girl, a handsome
guy, speed boat, thug with a gun, truck bearing down on you,
anything. Whatever it is, the very next thing we do is to react
to the stimulus with a feeling about it.

Take worry. We worry a lot. Worry itself is the problem. Worry
is a process. It has steps. Anxiety is not just a state of
existence but a procedure. What you've got to do is to look at
the very beginning of that procedure, those initial stages before
the process has built up a head of steam. The very first link of
the worry chain is the grasping/rejecting reaction. As soon as
some phenomenon pops into the mind, we try mentally to grab onto
it or push it away. That sets the worry response in motion.
Luckily, there is a handy little tool called Vipassana meditation
which you can use to short-circuit the whole mechanism.

Vipassana meditation teaches us how to scrutinize our own
perceptual process with great precision. We learn to watch the
arising of thought and perception with a feeling of serene
detachment. We learn to view our own reactions to stimuli with
calm and clarity. We begin to see ourselves reacting without
getting caught up in the reactions themselves. The obsessive
nature of thought slowly dies. We can still get married. We can
still step out of the path of the truck. But we don't need to go
through hell over either one.

This escape from the obsessive nature of thought produces a whole
new view of reality. It is a complete paradigm shift, a total
change in the perceptual mechanism. It brings with it the
feeling of peace and rightness, a new zest for living and a sense
of completeness to every activity. Because of these advantages,
Buddhism views this way of looking at things as a correct view of
life and Buddhist texts call it seeing things as they really are.

Vipassana meditation is a set of training procedures which open
us gradually to this new view of reality as it truly is. Along
with this new reality goes a new view of the most central aspect
of reality: 'me'. A close inspection reveals that we have done
the same thing to 'me' that we have done to all other
perceptions. We have taken a flowing vortex of thought, feeling
and sensation and we have solidified that into a mental
construct. Then we have stuck a label onto it, 'me'. And
forever after, we threat it as if it were a static and enduring
entity. We view it as a thing separate from all other things.
We pinch ourselves off from the rest of that process of eternal
change which is the universe. And than we grieve over how lonely
we feel. We ignore our inherent connectedness to all other
beings and we decide that 'I' have to get more for 'me'; then we
marvel at how greedy and insensitive human beings are. And on it
goes. Every evil deed, every example of heartlessness in the
world stems directly from this false sense of 'me' as distinct
from all else that is out there.

Explode the illusion of that one concept and your whole universe
changes. Don't expect to do this overnight, though. You spent
your whole life building up that concept, reinforcing it with
every thought, word, and deed over all those years. It is not
going to evaporate instantly. But it will pass if you give it
enough time and enough attention. Vipassana meditation is a
process by which it is dissolved. Little by little, you chip
away at it just by watching it.

The 'I' concept is a process. It is a thing we are doing. In
Vipassana we learn to see that we are doing it, when we are doing
it and how we are doing it. Then it moves and fades away, like a
cloud passing through the clear sky. We are left in a state
where we can do it or not do it, whichever seems appropriate to
the situation. The compulsiveness is gone. We have a choice.

These are all major insights, of course. Each one is a deep-
reaching understanding of one of the fundamental issues of human
existence. They do not occur quickly, nor without considerable
effort. But the payoff is big. They lead to a total
transformation of your life. Every second of your existence
thereafter is changed. The meditator who pushes all the way down
this track achieves perfect mental health, a pure love for all
that lives and complete cessation of suffering. That is not
small goal. But you don't have to go all the way to reap
benefits. They start right away and they pile up over the years.
It is a cumulative function. The more you sit, the more you
learn about the real nature of your won existence. The more
hours you spend in meditation, the greater your ability to calmly
observe every impulse and intention, every thought and emotion
just as it arises in the mind. Your progress to liberation is
measured in cushion-man hours. And you can stop any time you've
had enough. There is no stick over your head except your own
desire to see the true quality of life, to enhance your own
existence and that of others.

Vipassana meditation is inherently experiential. It is not
theoretical. In the practice of mediation you become sensitive
to the actual experience of living, to how things feel. You do
not sit around developing subtle and aesthetic thoughts about
living. You live. Vipassana meditation more than anything else
is learning to live.

Chapter 4

Attitude

Within the last century, Western science and physics have made a
startling discovery. We are part of the world we view. The very
process of our observation changes the things we observe. As an
example, an electron is an extremely tiny item. It cannot be
viewed without instrumentation, and that apparatus dictates what
the observer will see. If you look at an electron in one way, it
appears to be a particle, a hard little ball that bounces around
in nice straight paths. When you view it another way, an
electron appears to be a wave form, with nothing solid about it.
It glows and wiggles all over the place. An electron is an event
more than a thing. And the observer participates in that event
by the very process of his or her observation. There is no way
to avoid this interaction.

Eastern science has recognized this basic principle for a very
long time. The mind is a set of events, and the observer
participates in those events every time he or she looks inward.
Meditation is participatory observation. What you are looking at
responds to the process of looking. What you are looking at is
you, and what you see depends on how you look. Thus the process
of meditation is extremely delicate, and the result depends
absolutely on the state of mind of the meditator. The following
attitudes are essential to success in practice. Most of them
have been presented before. But we bring them together again
here as a series of rules for application.

1. Don't expect anything. Just sit back and see what happens.
Treat the whole thing as an experiment. Take an active interest
in the test itself. But don't get distracted by your
expectations about results. For that matter, don't be anxious
for any result whatsoever. Let the meditation move along at its
own speed and in its own direction. Let the meditation teach you
what it wants you to learn. Meditative awareness seeks to see
reality exactly as it is. Whether that corresponds to our
expectations or not, it requires a temporary suspension of all
our preconceptions and ideas. We must store away our images,
opinions and interpretations someplace out of the way for the
duration. Otherwise we will stumble over them.

2. Don't strain: Don't force anything or make grand exaggerated
efforts. Meditation is not aggressive. There is no violent
striving. Just let your effort be relaxed and steady.

3. Don't rush: There is no hurry, so take you time. Settle
yourself on a cushion and sit as though you have a whole day.
Anything really valuable takes time to develop. Patience,
patience, patience.

4. Don't cling to anything and don't reject anything: Let come
what comes and accommodate yourself to that, whatever it is. If
good mental images arise, that is fine. If bad mental images
arise, that is fine, too. Look on all of it as equal and make
yourself comfortable with whatever happens. Don't fight with
what you experience, just observe it all mindfully.

5. Let go: Learn to flow with all the changes that come up.
Loosen up and relax.

6. Accept everything that arises: Accept your feelings, even the
ones you wish you did not have. Accept your experiences, even
the ones you hate. Don't condemn yourself for having human flaws
and failings. Learn to see all the phenomena in the mind as
being perfectly natural and understandable. Try to exercise a
disinterested acceptance at all times and with respect to
everything you experience.

7. Be gentle with yourself: Be kind to yourself. You may not be
perfect, but you are all you've got to work with. The process of
becoming who you will be begins first with the total acceptance
of who you are.

8. Investigate yourself: Question everything. Take nothing for
granted. Don't believe anything because it sounds wise and pious
and some holy men said it. See for yourself. That does not mean
that you should be cynical, impudent or irreverent. It means you
should be empirical. Subject all statements to the actual test
of your experience and let the results be your guide to truth.
Insight meditation evolves out of an inner longing to wake up to
what is real and to gain liberating insight to the true structure
of existence. The entire practice hinges upon this desire to be
awake to the truth. Without it, the practice is superficial.

9. View all problems as challenges: Look upon negatives that
arise as opportunities to learn and to grow. Don't run from
them, condemn yourself or bear your burden in saintly silence.
You have a problem? Great. More grist for the mill. Rejoice,
dive in and investigate.

10. Don't ponder: You don't need to figure everything out.
Discursive thinking won't free you from the trap. In mediation,
the mind is purified naturally by mindfulness, by wordless bare
attention. Habitual deliberation is not necessary to eliminate
those things that are keeping you in bondage. All that is
necessary is a clear, non-conceptual perception of what they are
and how they work. That alone is sufficient to dissolve them.
Concepts and reasoning just get in the way. Don't think. See.

11. Don't dwell upon contrasts: Differences do exist between
people, but dwelling upon then is a dangerous process. Unless
carefully handled, it leads directly to egotism. Ordinary human
thinking is full of greed, jealousy and pride. A man seeing
another man on the street may immediately think, "He is better
looking than I am." The instant result is envy or shame. A girl
seeing another girl may think, "I am prettier than she is." The
instant result is pride. This sort of comparison is a mental
habit, and it leads directly to ill feeling of one sort or
another: greed, envy, pride, jealousy, hatred. It is an
unskillful mental state, but we do it all the time. We compare
our looks with others, our success, our accomplishments, our
wealth, possessions, or I.Q. and all these lead to the same
place--estrangement, barriers between people, and ill feeling.

The meditator's job is to cancel this unskillful habit by
examining it thoroughly, and then replacing it with another.
Rather than noticing the differences between self and others, the
meditator trains himself to notice similarities. He centers his
attention on those factors that are universal to all life, things
that will move him closer to others. Thus his comparison, if
any, leads to feelings of kinship rather than feelings of
estrangement.

Breathing is a universal process. All vertebrates breathe in
essentially the same manner. All living things exchange gasses
with their environment in some way or other. This is one of the
reasons that breathing is chosen as the focus of meditation. the
meditator is advised to explore the process of his own breathing
as a vehicle for realizing his own inherent connectedness with
the rest of life. This does not mean that we shut our eyes to
all the differences around us. Differences exist. It means
simply that we de-emphasize contrasts and emphasize the universal
factors. The recommended procedure is as follows:

When the meditator perceives any sensory object, he is not to
dwell upon it in the ordinary egotistical way. He should rather
examine the very process of perception itself. He should watch
the feelings that arise and the mental activities that follow.
He should note the changes that occur in his own consciousness as
a result. In watching all these phenomena, the meditator must be
aware of the universality of what he is seeing. That initial
perception will spark pleasant, unpleasant or neutral feelings.
That is a universal phenomenon. It occurs in the mind of others
just as it does in his, and he should see that clearly.
Following these feelings various reactions may arise. He may
feel greed, lust, or jealousy. He may feel fear, worry,
restlessness or boredom. These reactions are universal. He
simple notes them and then generalizes. He should realize that
these reactions are normal human responses and can arise in
anybody.

The practice of this style of comparison may feel forced and
artificial at first, but it is no less natural than what we
ordinarily do. It is merely unfamiliar. With practice, this
habit pattern replaces our normal habit of egoistic comparing and
feels far more natural in the long run. We become very
understanding people as a result. we no longer get upset by the
failings of others. We progress toward harmony with all life.